A look back at: Pokemon Resolute

It's been more than a month since the last rom hack I completed, and I played this one primarily in the nighttimes, trying to get everything while following someone else's walkthrough. And Resolute thankfully has a walkthrough, but I decided to help out by offering a different guide, showing hidden items, evolution changes, and the overall dex.

Resolute is easily the biggest rom hack I've played yet. Three regions, the new Sylon, the familiar Tyron from Victory Fire, and even Johto. That's bigger than Glazed (Rankor in that game was just a bunch of islands). The storytelling is much better, especially given the split in Team Mirage's ranks, and Sylon as a region is actually quite straightforward. Plus there were better catches this time around, and apart from Castform I'd say every mon is catchable (although I still cannot evolve Snorunts for some reason). I liked how there were characters that I was familiar with showing up in this hack, showcasing this as a better sequel. Much of Tyron remains the same, though things are much easier due to less reliance on TMs. I like the nonlinearity in battling the gyms in this region and in Johto.

Still, Resolute isn't perfect. The level curve is like Victory Fire, it goes up too fast, and by the time you go through Tyron and Johto, every trainer tends to have Lv80+ mons and it's not exciting. I ran into events that restarted after a loaded save, which sucked. I had to re-battle Morty in order to get to Bell Tower yet again when I got ready to battle Ho-oh, and also another event at the Ruins of Alph restarted. I don't like Rock Climb as an HM, and Flash being a TM was a bit difficult for me to even find. Some familiar Johto stuff was unused, and I ran into menu issues in certain towns (plus the Safari Zone menu showed up at one point which was really stupid). I also kinda hate how I have to battle Uranium, the Tyron champion at that point, and Lance (who we all know by now) well before their champion battles. I got rather fatigued with battles at the end, so I didn't bother with the Johto Elite Four (which is still interesting though, because you fight four champions at once at the end) or the Battle Department (which is a weird tournament thing where you can choose trainers and gym leaders to battle). I hear that the final tournament is broken and not reachable too. Oh this definitely had quite some potential for sure, but that's mostly with its storyline.